


The Signpost

by babe_without_the_arms



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Angst, Domestic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-06
Updated: 2017-04-06
Packaged: 2018-10-15 11:28:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10555548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/babe_without_the_arms/pseuds/babe_without_the_arms
Summary: Dale was not a true art expert like Windom, but he knew what he liked. And there was a painting in the Earles’ dining room that he liked very much. It was called “Two Red Hands Hold the Dream,” and it was stark and beautiful, like everything else in the Earle household, in a way that held Dale in a rapturous trance from the first moment he laid eyes on it.





	

The Earles, like all elite New England couples, were art collectors. Their tastes were very fine, very elegant, and reserved. If you asked them about their pieces, you would hear many charming and picturesque stories about where and how they acquired their collection; stories from their travels in Paris and Mexico City, from the downtown studio scene of New York, from the private dealer in Vermont whose family has been buying art for the Earle family for three generations.

Dale was not a true art expert like Windom, but he knew what he liked. And there was a painting in the Earles’ dining room that he liked very much. It was called “Two Red Hands Hold the Dream,” and like everything else in the Earle household, it held Dale in a rapturous trance from the first moment he laid eyes on it.

“Oh yes, I quite like this one,” Windom mused, when Dale had asked him about it during his first meal as a guest at the Earle home. “We purchased it from a gallery during our honeymoon in the Caribbean.” He placed a hand over Caroline’s on the table and smiled.

“The dealer was unsure of the artist’s name or its place of origin.” Caroline interjected, and smiled back at her husband. “Generally, Windom is very particular about knowing where our art comes from, but we saw this painting and just knew it belonged in our new home together.” 

And indeed, there was something innately Earle about the painting, something stark, something intensely beautiful, and though Dale could not have articulated it at the time, something reminiscent of a dream he had once or perhaps a hundred times, of a young girl seated in a red, red room, with her arms bent way, way back. 

Later, Dale would like awake in his hospital bed and see the painting hovering above him, just as it had hung above their dining room table night after night, a signpost that he had only learned to read after it was too late; it had hung as a silent witness to everything, the dinners, the parties, the late night chess games, the stolen glances and the lingering touches, his best friend’s disappearance, and then finally Caroline’s kidnapping. 

“Evil will win because of guile,” Windom had muttered into his wine glass that terrible night. Dale had said nothing. Instead he just swallowed the lump of grief and despair in his throat and stared at Two Red Hands Hold the Dream, trying to make sense of why it suddenly looked different to him. Then he realized the painting had been moved.

“Windom, did you move that painting?”

“What?”

“Two Red Hands. Wasn’t it a few feet to the left?”

“Perhaps, I couldn’t say. Caroline is always redecorating…”

Dale stared at the painting, suddenly desperate to remember where in his mind he had seen something like it before, all of his mental and spiritual energy reaching out to the painting to try to place it in the annals of his subconscious memory--

Then suddenly its metal hanging fixtures inexplicably snapped, and the whole thing crashed to the floor, revealing a dent in the wall. A dent that he had seen many times as an agent in the field, but a dent that he could not see–refused to see–in this moment as Dale Cooper.

Windom, brows furrowed, said he had no idea where it came from.


End file.
